below: After the rain the leaves lie stuck to the path and tangled up in the grass.

below: Or stuck in the fence

below: You can’t escape the cranes…..

below: … or the hoardings.

below: Magnus and Angel are missing…. Is this a coincidence?

below: Pink flowers and a purple door.

below: Built in 1892, this building was once the Church of the Messiah Rectory. The church is the next building to the right (with the slightly yellow stones)

below: Faded flower of a different kind

below: Building behind the Rosedale Diner, as seen from Crown Lane

below: Locked door

below: Graffiti on private property.

below: The limestone Summerhill LCBO store which was originally the North Toronto Canadian Pacific train station. The clock tower is 43m high.

below: From a different angle, the station when it was first built in 1916. The tracks are still there but only freight trains pass by these days. It only lasted as a passenger station until September 1930. Back in the day if you wanted to take a train to Lindsay or Bobcaygeon, this is where you’d go although you could also get a train to Ottawa (via Peterborough & Smith’s Falls) or Montreal.

below: No stop ahead

below: “Help negro and white people mass (?) produce painted stones and hide them” plus a lot of other lines and shapes that might be letters or words.

below: I also came across this box yesterday – Sam the Chinese Food Man and other signs.

below: I have vague memories of such a Sam’s restaurant so I went online to find out more about it. What I found is this image in a “Lost Toronto” blogpost. It is Yonge Street just south of Gerrard (the Rio Theatre was 373 Yonge Street). Did you know that Toronto once had a wax museum?

ZimSculpt is the name of the exhibit now on at Edwards Gardens. Placed around the gardens are a large number of stone sculptures by Zimbabwean artists. There are also small pieces on display inside a tent-like structure near the parking lot. All items are for sale along with some baskets and jewellery. Here are some of the sculptures:

below: Giving Advice by Boet Nyariri, carved in springstone

below: (after the garden was watered!), Mother and Son, by Joe Mutasa, carved in springstone.

Happy Victoria Day!
Happy 2 4 long weekend.
More correctly, I hope that you had a good weekend!

This blog post is the result of a walk through Mt. Pleasant cemetery, down the ravine behind Yonge Street that goes under St. Clair East and the Summerhill railway bridge. After crossing Mt. Pleasant Road, take the right at the fork in the path to go uphill on Milkman Lane. This brings you out of the ravine close to Glen Road. Follow Glen Road south to Sherbourne subway station.

below: Lots of shades of red, green, and yellow in the cemetery.

I will dedicate this post to the man that I met on the path near the St. Clair bridge. He had many questions about the path and where it went. He was in awe that such a place existed in the city and was so excited to find it. He couldn’t linger though because he was on a break from work.

below: Dense clusters of fragile pink and white petals on a Japanese Flowering Cherry Prunus Serrulata.

below: The chains of humankind? Or something creepier? Please don’t put anything like this on my tombstone regardless of what they symbolism might be!

below: It was very quiet and surprisingly green on the path. I had procrastinated about walking in the ravines because I didn’t think that spring was far enough along. Surprise! Spring has sprung very quickly – the leaves have been popping out all over the place. May is a fantastic month – everything comes alive so quickly.

below: Walking on Park Drive, under Glen Road, following the Yellow Creek.

below: It looks like a throne under the bridge!

below: Yellow Creek, near St. Clair.

below: Wildlife!

below: Fungi growing out of a rotting log on the forest floor.

below: Mushrooms of a more colourful variety

below: Under St. Clair.

below: I didn’t see any real ones that day. You can spot this one close to Sherbourne subway station.

I went on a whim. No one has ever called me ‘fashionable’ when it comes to clothing!

I went not knowing what to expect and was very pleasantly surprised at what I encountered. The majority of the exhibit consists of dresses designed by Christian Dior from 1947 to 1957.

Christian Dior was born in a seaside town in northern France in 1905. He began his career in fashion by selling fashion sketches in the early 1930’s after a failed attempt to run an art gallery. This led to a job as a design assistant with Paris couturier Robert Piguet. His career took off after WW2 when he started his own business, House of Dior (Maison Dior), in 1947.

below: This simple but classy two piece dress with black cummerbund is from Dior’s 1948 autumn-winter collection. It is made with black velvet with iridescent bead work. The bottom part is a mid-calf length skirt with the same beading. Actually, the words simple and classy describe most of the dresses here.

below: Embroidery with beads and stacked sequins in intricate designs.

below: The fabulous colours of fabric samples – this is only a small part of the display of fabrics with “a silk warp and a dupion weft”. Warp and weft are weaving terms – warp refers to the threads that run lengthwise down the fabric while weft refers to the crosswise threads. Dupion is similar to silk but it is thicker and more uneven.

below: This dress is made from the silk fabric described above.

Christian Dior’s success as a designer and a businessman continued until 1957 when he died while on vacation in Italy. Yves Saint Laurent spent a few years as the Artistic Director immediately after Dior’s death although he was only 21. There have been countless designers and many changes since then but the the company still exists as part of LVMH. I was surprised to learn that the full name of the company is LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. I also hadn’t realized that many of the luxury brands that we recognize the names of are actually controlled/owned by 3 companies: LVMH, Kering, and Richemont. If you have a few minutes, take a cruise through wikipedia.

below: There was a small display of jewelry, including this necklace by Maison Gripoix. It is a string of lily of the valley flowers made from green and white handmade glass paste. Glass paste, or pâte de verre, is made by mixing finely ground glass, binding agents, and colour. The resulting ‘paste; is molded and then kiln fired. Apparently the lily of the valley was Christian Dior’s “lucky flower”.

The exhibit is presented by Holt Renfrew and you can find it on the 4th floor of the ROM…. until 18 March 2018. In the meantime, you can find more information on the ROM website.

“Sing me a rainbow, paint me a dream.
Show me a world that I’ve never seen.”

The first Monday after the “fall back” time change is always one of my favorite days of the year. That’s when I feel like I got an extra hour of sleep. So I woke up feeling great but of course it’s November so there were some grey clouds. Still, the phrase “I can sing a rainbow” was stuck in my head. But I don’t sing, so I did the next best thing and took a rainbow of photos as I walked today. Beat the blahs away by capturing the brightest moments.

below: And what goes best with rainbows? Why not a unicorn?! It looks like the work of #whatsvictorupto

If you know the children’s song, “I Can Sing a Rainbow”, you will know that the colours in the lyrics aren’t in the correct ROYGBV order (or IV at the end if you include indigo). It’s a cute little song so I will forgive the author.

And in case your childhood didn’t include this song, here are the words:
Red and yellow and pink and green,
Purple and orange and blue,
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow too.

Listen with your eyes,
Listen with you ears,
And sing everything you see.
I can sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow,
Sing a rainbow too.

It’s early November and autumn is here – I think. Some leaves, like on the locust and maple trees below, have turned colours and begun to fall but others remain green and on the tree. After the warm than usual October that we were fortunate to have, the weather has turned to grey and damp and all too seasonally November. Luckily, a heavier coat and a scarf is all that is required – so off we go!

below: I spotted these little rusted Coke and Sprite signs on a house on Christie street. Like the autumn leaves, the weather has changed their colours and I especially like the pale turquoise that the Sprite bottle has become. It nicely matches the trim on the neighbour’s house.

below: Another example of the effects of time on metal. A little less rust here but there are some interesting shapes and forms created by the peeling paint.

below: Looking into a shop window to see a sad and lonely cat. Sad eyes? or are they eyes of a cat dreaming of the outside world and wishing it wasn’t relegated to a shelf of old and empty things.

below: More old, but certainly not sad. It’s a bright, shiny and obviously well-loved Chrysler.

below: Advice to heed.

below: No wise words here – just scrawls and tags. But isn’t the orange a fantastic colour for a wall?

below: Tiny! A teensie tiny little house with a lawn that’s sparse but neatly kept. Once you start looking for these little treasures, you realize that there are quite a few of them in Toronto. I wonder if anyone has documented them?

Warning – tangent ahead! This reminds of a children’s story called “Benjamin Budge and Barnaby Ball” written by Florence Heide Parry. It’s a story of two men living in two different houses. Benjamin was a very big man living in a very small house while Barnaby was a very small man living in a big house. The illustrations of Benjamin squeezing into his mini sized house were wonderful (by Sally Matthews). Of course, to live happily ever after the two men trade houses.

“Benjamin Budge was a great big man,
A great big huge TREMENDOUS man,
But his tiny house was so very small,
There wasn’t room for him at all!”

below: Benjamin Budge sleeps ‘in’ his bed

below: Veering back to the subject of architecture… this style of apartment building was very common in the 1920’s. Three storeys, no elevator and probably no parking but with charming little details in the brickwork. If I remember correctly, this building is on Bathurst street just south of Dupont.

Little vegetable gardens in both back and front yards are very numerous here, probably because of the combination of the large number of Italian and Portuguese immigrants who settled here and the popularity of ‘urban farming’ – veggies instead of grass. Being November, there were only a few remnants of this year’s harvest – a few tomato plants here and some Swiss chard there.

below: One back yard still has all its wooden stakes standing on guard. A forest of stakes.

below: Another way to garden in the city!

below: Xena the warrior princess still watches over Vermont Avenue. She’s faded a bit since I last took her picture two years ago. You can see her (and others) in Neighbourhood watch good guys that I posted in 2015.

There are lots of lanes and alleys in Seaton village (this part of the city). One of last year’s blog posts ‘same, same, but different‘ is about some of the lanes. There is some street art in these alleys but not too much – here are a couple from yesterday’s visit.

On Dundas West, just west of Dufferin, there are two lanes with large murals by clandestinos.

One is the alley to the west of the Lulu Lounge where both sides are covered with fantastic paintings by fiya, shalak, and bruno smoky as well as a few others. I blogged about it just over two years ago and here is the link to the original post, “life as the shadow of vida“. Earlier this week I took another look at it – it’s still looking great and there have been no changes so I didn’t take any photos.

The other alley is nearby but on the north side of Dundas Street. Actually, it’s hardly an alley, more like a driveway which made taking pictures of the whole mural difficult. Also, if you are traveling eastbound on Dundas, you’d miss it. Here are the pictures that I managed to take: